Kelly Preston: How I Healed After Son’s Death

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FOX file photo.

Kelly Preston: How I Healed After Son’s Death

FOX file photo.

By Tomika Anderson, Special to CNN

(CNN) — It’s been three years since the death of Kelly Preston and John Travolta’s son Jett, and the actress reveals in a new interview what’s helped her heal.

Preston and Travolta lost Jett at age 16 to a seizure in 2009, a death that was “unfathomable,” as Preston said recently on Lifetime’s “The Conversation With Amanda de Cadenet.”

“I’ve had enormous loss,” Preston, 49, said. “Nobody should have to lose a child. It’s unfathomable. But I’m here to say that you can get through it. You can live again. You can want to live again.”

It was the support of friends and family members that helped Preston recuperate, she told host de Cadenet.

“People were so beautiful – so, so extraordinary from all over the world,” said Preston, who also has a daughter, Ella Bleu, and a son, Benjamin, with Travolta. “Everybody grieves in their own way. I felt at times [that] I was drowning. It felt like a sea of wet blankets. And I just peeled them off, layer by layer, so that I can now [say], ‘I want to live. I love life. My life is beautiful and amazing. I’ve got amazing children, and Jett is so much a part of my life.”

She also credited the teachings of her faith for helping her stay strong.

“In Scientology, we have what’s called ‘auditing,’ and that helps you to address things in your life and to strip them away and work through them,” she explained on the show. “It’s a path of spiritual enlightenment. Also, it helps rid the mind of painful experience completely.”

Those at her church “literally held my hand and got me through,” she said. “I will forever be indebted. You never forget, but I feel like the weight of the world was lifted.”

There are certainly still tough moments, “but I am able to live,” she added. “And to want to live. I can laugh. I’m – for the most part – happy. That’s the greatest gift ever.”